Monday, July 18, 2016

Recently new funds have been made available to the University of Amsterdam's Faculty of Humanities through the so-called Sustainable Humanities programme (Duurzame Geesteswetenschappen). The faculty has decided to dedicate part of the funds to creating five new PhD positions (4 years, 0.8 fte each).

Previous contact with the Faculty of Humanities or possible
supervisors is not necessary. International researchers are also
encouraged to apply. Proposed projects must be relevant to one of the
research schools within AIHR or to ILLC (in the case of music cognition
related proposals).

Applications should include a description of the proposed research project (max. 2500 words, written in English), a full academic CV, and a list of MA/MSc grades (see link below for more information). Applicants must have a completed Master’s degree in a relevant field before the start date of the fellowship.

Wednesday, July 13, 2016

The music theory literature has been suggesting it for a long time: the idea that simultaneously sounding tones with frequency relationships that are low integer multiples, like 1:2 (octave) or 3:2 (a perfect fifth), are determinant of how listeners perceive consonance. It is an idea that is often related to the overtone structure of natural sounds (such as the voice or string instruments) suggesting that musical harmony is reflective or even a result of the acoustic structure that is found in natural, harmonic sounds that are surrounding us (see earlier entries).

However, a study that was published in Nature today, makes both ideas quite unlikely (McDermott et al., 2016). The authors conclude that "consonance preferences are unlikely to be innate, and that they are not driven by exposure to harmonic natural sounds such as vocalizations." Instead, consonance preferences seem to depend on exposure to particular types of music, presumably those that feature consonant harmony. In an elegantly controlled study McDermott and colleagues compared the perception of musical, speech and natural sounds in North American listeners (both musicians and non-musicians) and compared them to two groups of Bolivian listeners, of which one group rarely is in contact with Western culture, a tribe named Tsimane' (Chimane).

All participants rated the pleasantness of sounds. Despite exhibiting Western-like discrimination abilities and Western-like aesthetic responses to familiar sounds and acoustic roughness, the Tsimane’ rated consonant and dissonant chords and vocal harmonies as equally pleasant. By contrast, Bolivian city- and town-dwellers exhibited significant preferences for consonance, albeit to a lesser degree than North American listeners. The results indicate that consonance preferences can be absent in cultures sufficiently isolated from Western music, and are thus unlikely to reflect innate biases or exposure to harmonic natural sounds. It seems we can remove 'consonance perception' from our list of candidate constituent elements that might underlie the human predisposition for music, i.e. musicality (see Honing et al., 2015).